Erik Haugen @ech@qoto.org

@freemo @dashrandom I think you know what I mean. 😂 You're assuming people you disagree with are doing what they do with the worst possible motives, rather than for the reason they say they're doing it. You're doing this for no discernible reason. It's weird.

Here's one of several problems with it: I don't know, maybe Dash thinks corporal punishment is a responsible way to raise kids, and here maybe you have a chance to convince someone! But instead, you blow the opportunity: you come off like an unhinged person, certainly unlikely to convince anyone who knows *very well* that they personally use corporal punishment because they honestly believe it is the best way to keep their kid from running with scissors.

@freemo @dashrandom I think coming up with silly caricatures of people you disagree with rarely ends up being useful.

@claude_cahun "your criticism of Israel" Specifically here I mean like questioning whether they could do more to protect innocents. More broadly things like due process and fairly enforcing laws and so on.

The rest of your note... that's what I was trying to respond to with my previous note, so I'm not sure what to say to move this forward.

@claude_cahun well I think I made it pretty clear up thread that anything Israel is doing is definitely an appropriate target for criticism. I'm maybe not saying the same things you heard someone else say? (As a voter in the US, this criticism is important for me to do.)

The point here is just that simplistically casting any civilian casualties as "collective punishment" is maybe not helpful without further analysis. I appreciate your comment because you aren't doing that.

You make a good point of course about history not beginning on October 7th. But still, my take on things at this point is that Hamas cannot be allowed to continue to exist as is, so the IDF seems to need to carry out this military operation. The rest of us should be closely watching how they do that, to minimize civilian suffering, of course.

Maybe that's wrong, though: there are reasons to think a military operation can't help. I don't know.

@chiraag @freemo Oh I see. Well, I think anyone who is serious knows the vast majority of Palestinians are less than thrilled with Hamas, to say the least: https://twitter.com/cvaldary/status/1718803547968483437 puts it well.

It feels like you're getting at a moral comparison between the Myanmar military and the IDF in these two situations. They seem quite different. If that wasn't your point, beg pardon; please ignore this paragraph.

Anyway: pretty much every war ever, just or not, ends up looking like collective punishment, unfortunately. The only answer I know of is not to start a war? It seems like it is too late for that here.

@chiraag @freemo What's the upshot of that?

@chiraag @freemo Do the Rohingya have their own government that carried out an attack on ethnic Burmese, killing thousands, raping, and kidnapping? If so, Burma might be reasonable in attacking military Rohingya targets as a part of the war that the Rohingya started. Civilian casualties of course would be expected, and we should all pressure Burma to minimize those.

As far as I know, nothing remotely like any of that happened there.

@SandyO@urbanists.social @QasimRashid I think in rhetoric and political debate around this it is probably best to start from a shared assumption that Hamas is a baby killing rapist terrorist group of thugs, and so our questions are more about how to best degrade their abilities, stop similar groups from rising up, and so on rather than whether we want them to do something different like return hostages or stop using human shields. Of course all civilized persons think they should free hostages, and stop taking hostages or do sick thuggish/terrorist things like use human shields. No need to call on people like Rashid to repeat that over and over again. He even just said, unnecessarily in his 2nd post, that he believes in the sanctity of Jewish and Palestinian lives.

The useful questions are things more like:
* is there a non-military solution that gets them to stop raping/killing/kidnapping?
* how do we degrade their capabilities without "radicalizing" more people to take their place?
* how do we get actors like Iran to stop using them and the Palestinian people for their own political gains?
* Should we pressure Israel to e.g. better enforce protections against settler violence, or better due process before doing things like bulldozing suicide bombers' houses?

I say "we" here because I'm in the US and as far as I can tell my tax dollars are bankrolling whatever the IDF is doing here: Rashid will have outsized influence on these questions if he wins the election, even though this isn't Israel.

@anubis2814 @QasimRashid Yeah, anti-semitism doesn't need much prodding to rear its ugly head from all over the political spectrum. Disgusting.

@OvertonDoors @QasimRashid Bill Foster is a conservative?

@hedgielib AI can help you write the prose you need to write to do (1), (2), and (4). *ducks*

@ljrk @QasimRashid Yeah, it's regrettable that Foster walked away (is that what happened?) instead of asking about what you're saying – "how can Israel achieve the security goals it obviously needs to achieve if it ceases firing weapons?" There might be great answers to that question; I'm not really sure what they are, though.

@rbreich Naively, I'd think the right answer is to make it cheaper and more effective to do table stakes things like "make sure people file".

Perhaps if the tax code were simpler this would be possible.

But even if not – why is that the expensive thing that IRS doesn't do, first, if it is short on funds?

@kinyutaka @LevZadov @ekes @justpeachy @ItsTrainingCatsAndDogs@kolektiva.social here's another metaphor: suppose there's a guy who rapes, kills, and kidnaps babies. Then the cops get into a shootout trying to arrest that guy. Someone is killed by a stray bullet.

At this point it's pretty reasonable to thoroughly investigate if the cops are taking necessary precautions to avoid that sort of thing, while at the same time recognizing that it's probably not possible to completely avoid any risk of that and still arrest the rapist baby murderer.

FWIW some people like Jordan Peterson seem to think IDF shouldn't even try to use force here; like in the metaphor don't arrest the guy at all.

@justpeachy @ekes @LevZadov @ItsTrainingCatsAndDogs@kolektiva.social well, I'm asking what those other ways are. I sure hope there are other ways; I've explicitly said I don't know what they are, though?

@justpeachy @ekes @LevZadov @Linux_Is_Best@mstdn.social @ItsTrainingCatsAndDogs@kolektiva.social Then what instead?

@justpeachy @ekes @LevZadov @Linux_Is_Best@mstdn.social @ItsTrainingCatsAndDogs@kolektiva.social No, I mean in response to the mass murder. After the mass murder/rape/kidnapping on Oct 7, naively I would think the IDF would at some point need to degrade the capabilities of the group that carried it out. (especially since they say they intend to repeat it many times: ‘there will be a second, a third, a fourth’). How do they do this while minimizing civilian casualties? I had hoped they could do better than they are now, but I have no idea if that is realistic.

This matters in a practical sense to me personally, because the government I have the privilege to vote for seems to be bankrolling whatever they're doing: because of that it is on me to find an answer to this question, at least in some sense.

@kinyutaka @LevZadov @ekes @justpeachy @Linux_Is_Best@mstdn.social @ItsTrainingCatsAndDogs@kolektiva.social And those internment camps were far from the worst example of things the Allies should have done differently!

@ekes @LevZadov @justpeachy @Linux_Is_Best@mstdn.social @ItsTrainingCatsAndDogs@kolektiva.social Exactly; that gets at what I'm asking. (I don't get the "please... " line?)

So are they missing the mark in this regard? How do we (you and I) evaluate this – assuming we don't want to take the IDF's or Hamas' word for it?

@rticks@mastodon.social @LevZadov @justpeachy @Linux_Is_Best@mstdn.social @ItsTrainingCatsAndDogs@kolektiva.social Dude nobody cares if you block them.